2024-07-17 20:15:03
What I’ve always remembered most clearly from J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir, 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy, is its scorching descriptions of the lies that the working-class rural white Americans he grew up among tell themselves. An account of his chaotic and often perilous upbringing among people with roots in Appalachia, and of his seemingly miraculous climb out of that morass and into Yale Law School, Vance’s book hit at the most opportune moment. Many middle-class Americans were reeling after the election of Donald Trump and wanted some insight into what had possessed people like Vance’s relatives and sometime neighbors to vote for him. (But not Vance himself, of course! In 2018 he wrote an afterword to Hillbilly Elegy noting that he’d voted third party in 2016.)
Now that Vance stands a good chance of becoming vice president, the saga of his journey out of poverty, violence, and despair makes an even more dramatic story, though not one, I suspect, Vance would presently care to revisit. All the qualities that made Hillbilly Elegy one of the best books I read in 2016—its brutal honesty, its challenges to the self-delusional and self-defeating aspects of hillbilly culture, its mournful ambivalence about the identity he’s only partially left behind—have been shamelessly jettisoned by Vance for the sake of his political career. Not least of these is the belief that Donald Trump could become “America’s Hitler” and is a supplier of “cultural heroin”—the latter no small jab from a man whose mother’s narcotics abuse tore up his childhood.
As Vance relates in his afterword, critics of Hillbilly Elegy from the left accused the book of being “a victim-blaming piece of anti-government libertarianism,” while those from the right swore that it prescribed “a massive expansion of government welfare programs.” At the time, before Vance launched his political career, his policy positions seemed much less relevant than his depiction of a dysfunctional culture from the inside.
To be clear, Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir and not notably polemical. It is mostly a family story. Vance does not denounce the social safety net, and in fact admits that it “prevented a lot of suffering” and is necessary to “protect our society’s less fortunate.” He excoriates his able-bodied neighbors and relatives who draw government benefits and never worked, yet who constantly complain that “too many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need.” He rejects the racial insinuations lurking behind those neighbors’ laments, remarking, “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.” He avers, “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks. This is not a story about why white people have more to complain about than black people or any other group.” Nowhere in the book does Vance express concerns about immigrants, documented or otherwise, or the perfidy of the deep state.
Vance was a conservative when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, but you don’t have to agree with his every political position back then to recognize the value of one of the book’s key insights: that no public policy can overcome an entrenched and toxic cultural legacy if the people immersed in it aren’t willing to question that legacy themselves. Laws against rape, for example, won’t solve the problem of sexual assault; we need to scrutinize rape culture as well. In the case of Vance’s community, that toxic legacy consists of, among other things, a “bizarre sexism” and the belief that doing well at school is contemptibly “feminine,” as well as an honor code dictating that any minor public slight, like being cut off in traffic, ought to be countered with violence.
Vance’s political supporters still approach Vance with copies of Hillbilly Elegy, requesting his autograph, but you have to wonder if they’ve actually read it lately. Much like the entire Republican Party, Vance has spent the past eight years not only abandoning but methodically repudiating the values he once espoused, signing on to Trump’s politics of grievance, paranoia, and self-pity, the easy excuses in “blaming Obama or Bush” that he once condemned. He has set aside his former disdain for “elites” and submitted to kissing the ring of a wealthy reality TV star from New York City. And all complexity and ambivalence has disappeared from his rhetoric, replaced by peacocking certainty that he, and Trump, is the answer to America’s problems. Like those old neighbors of his who griped about welfare queens, Vance has gotten very comfortable with his own hypocrisy. After all, he learned it from experts.
